Entertainment

LulzSec Hackers Take Down CIA Website

After recently attacking a number of gaming websites, the hacker group known as LulzSec has used a DDoS attack to take down the CIA's website, www.cia.gov.

The site is now back online, but it had been inaccessible for several hours.

LulzSec got the public's attention by hacking Sony's servers, capturing hundreds of thousands of personal user records, which is — by the group's own admission — its biggest attack. The same group also claims to have attacked the servers of Nintendo and the U.S. Senate.

LulzSec's tactics include fairly simple DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks that flood web servers with requests and take them down for a period of time, hacks of people's personal accounts and actually breaking into servers of various companies and organizations. The group's motives range from supposedly hacktivist ones to pure "fun" — and it's getting harder to tell where one ends and the other begins.

One thing separates LulzSec from many other similar groups, however: Its members are actively communicating with users, and they love the attention. And with a high-profile site being attacked almost daily in the past several weeks, we're sure we'll hear more about LulzSec in future.

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